The Trump Coup Didn’t Fail: It’s Just Getting Started – Wilkerson and Jay Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. In just a few seconds, I’ll be back with Colonel Larry Wilkerson, and we’re going to talk about, of course, Donald Trump. Don’t forget the donate button and back in just a second.

Before I get started with Larry, here are a few clips for you to consider. First, Donald Trump on the election campaign promising to his fellow Christians there will be no elections in four years.

Donald Trump

You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you. Get out. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again.

Paul Jay

We have a clip of Mark Cuban talking to Jon Stewart where he essentially says what the billionaires, certainly the Silicon billionaires, want is a CEO/monarch. Here’s Cuban.

Mark Cuban

They’ve gotten to the point now where they feel like they should control the world, and that there should be a CEO in charge of everything.

Jon Stewart

Because they have a good photo app?

Mark Cuban

Because they’re rich as fuck, right? It’s just like you get to that point sometimes where I think they’ve lost the connection to the real world.

Paul Jay

And here’s a piece from FDR. He sends a message to Congress in 1938 about the power of monopolies in the United States and the danger that it represents to democracy.

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

I should add to that. It was only a few years before that some of the big bankers approached Smedley Butler, who was at the time the most famous soldier in America and asked him to front a coup against FDR. Butler reported it to a Congressional Committee, and it didn’t go any further. Of course, none of the billionaires or the people working for– I should say multimillionaires at the time, not billionaires– none of them faced any consequences.

Now, joining us to talk about perhaps a current attempt where the bankers and their allies, or sections of the bankers and their allies, are staging a coup in plain sight, I think, is Colonel Larry Wilkerson. As everybody knows, he was the former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell and a friend of theAnalysis.news. Thanks for joining us, Larry.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

Good to be with you, Paul.

Paul Jay

So what’s your take on… I mean, it clearly goes beyond Trump won. I have been saying for a while, I thought some lines were seriously crossed on January 6, and it wasn’t just what happened on Capitol Hill; it was the lead-up. There really was a plan and an attempt to have a military intervention to prevent the transition of power. It failed. But they crossed some lines there, and I think we’re seeing this play itself out now. What’s your take on what we’re seeing?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

That could very well be the case. I think I could make a fairly good case based on just the evidence available to the general public that that was really an attempt, and they got cold feet, many of them at the last minute, including the president, and certainly the vice president, if he even knew about it. It just petered out. It didn’t just peter out. There was some damage done, and people were actually hurt. I do think it was a little bit more than we are now treating it, and certainly, the way the Republicans and Trump himself are treating it. They learned some lessons.

Those lessons were, we need to come at this a lot more methodically, a lot more carefully, and a lot more planned, and we need to have our ducks in line. By the way, in the first four years, we learned where most of those ducks that we need to shoot sit. One of the things we’re going to do right off the bat is cause chaos and confusion, but in that chaos and confusion, we’re going to eliminate a lot of those ducks. That’s what you’re seeing now. I could make that case. I don’t want to believe that completely right now because I think that is going to be, as others are pointing out right now, in some apocalyptic manner, this is a disaster. Ralph Nader’s piece that just came out, for example, stand by for the terror because it’s here. It’s going to happen.

Paul Jay

What is it you don’t want to believe or are finding it hard to believe? It seems like they were pretty open about what they wanted. I did a video leading up to the elections about Peter Thiel’s vision of American democracy, which he says is not really possible anymore. He finds modern capitalism and democracy not compatible. There are quotes from Musk. Certainly, Bannon has been pretty clear. Bannon, I think, called himself a Leninist at one point. In other words, first, you destroy the state, and then you can create the state you want. What is it you don’t believe about this?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

Well, it’s not so much that I don’t believe the worst about the people carrying out this, whatever it is. It’s that I believe the system is still robust enough enough to stop them and that there are still people concerned enough and smart enough to provide the assistance necessary to the system to do that. I think what we’re looking at, if we’re right, you’re right, others, Ralph Nader is right, we’re looking at a major clash between the system and its safeguards, what our founders put together, and this group of people. Whether Donald Trump is coherently involved in it as a character who’s motivating it, I don’t know. I suspect that there are people around him who are doing more of the engine work than he is and that he’s more or less a foil for them. But I don’t know. I don’t know the man at all. I’ve talked with a number of people who do know him and have known him since he was a young man, and that doesn’t give me a lot of hope. It doesn’t bolster my view of his character.

We’re at a point where, as I’ve said before, years ago I said this, we’re at a point where we were in 1859 and 1860. Some of Heather Cox Richardson’s words are accurate. We’ve always had these people in this country who were pious, wanted God in the Bible, wanted to wrap themselves in the flag, wanted to do all that’s necessary to make God’s country more perfect, and they’re willing to throw the Constitution out in order to do that, and people who believed in real democracy, and the equality of people, and the fairness and justice that should come along with that real democracy. So we’ve always had that fight.

I go back to that book by the Brit, or not by the Brit, but about the Brits; Chris Dickey wrote the book, he’s dead now, Our Man in Charleston, when he’s describing vividly to the prime minister and the foreign minister in Britain what’s going on with the South in 1859, ’60, ’61, ’62, and ’63. He’s in their councils. They are rushing him, if you will, like a pledge at a fraternity because they want Britain to throw in with the South. So they just tell him all their secrets. They bring him into their councils, and he does not disabuse them. He hates their guts. He’s vehemently anti-slavery, passionately anti-slavery. He understands what he’s seeing, what he’s recording, and what he is sending by coded cable to Britain to try and dissuade them from coming in on the side of the South. It just so happens he has a prime minister and a foreign minister who think slavery is an anathema. And that’s the real… It’s not Antietam that changes their mind. That adds ammunition to their decision making and sways the parliament because the North has proven now it can win. But the real thing that sways their mind is all these cables coming to them and telling them, your battle against slavery will be set back a century if these people become in charge. What he describes these people, from Jeff Davis to you name it, he’s in the hornet’s nest. It is despicable. They are despicable people. But the descriptions are a hell of a lot like some of the people who are gathered around Donald Trump right now and a hell of a lot like a lot of his followers, and I hate to say, a lot of those who voted for him. We’ve always had this. I think Heather Cox Richardson is right in that regard. We’ve always had this tension between those who want slaves and those who don’t.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I think that describes the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Let me frame it slightly differently. There’s been a fight over just how intensely to exploit workers. There’s no debate whether to do it or not. There’s a debate: do you do it without unions? Do you do it in a way that you terrorize people with high unemployment? Do you terrorize immigrants? Or do you do what Biden did, work with the unions? It’s not about not exploiting, but not as intensely. And that’s partly because the Democrats need the urban votes. It’s not because… I don’t know that they’re such nicer people.

Let me go back to what I said earlier, that attempted coup against the New Deal, against FDR, and I guess it was in 1933, the Smedley Butler– people can read about this– Butler wrote this book, War is a Racket, that denounced the warmongering that led to U.S. involvement in the First World War and so on. But that attempt to overthrow the New Deal, that’s been the fight since the New Deal. The Democrats, since World War II, have been in on undoing much of the New Deal. Even there, it’s a split on how much you undo the New Deal.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

The arch-democrat in that was Bill Clinton. He just went at it. When he was on the committee, he wanted to move the Democratic Party more to the center. He saw what the Republicans were doing. He saw they were getting votes for doing it. He wanted to move them over. He wanted to be business. He wanted to be corporately friendly, all those things. Boom, let’s get rid of all the things. Let’s finish off FDR’s changes because that’ll make us politically more sellable. It did. It did. It made him a two-term president.

Paul Jay

I think there are two things. One is Trump, Musk, Peter Thiel, and the others around there, Bannon. When they say make America great again, they’re quite open about when America was great. You got to ask the question, when was the great again? They’re very clear. It’s the late 19th century and early 20th century. It’s when there was absolutely no restriction on the level and intensity of exploitation. There was next to no antitrust legislation. It was an absolute free-rein form of capitalism. That’s what Bannon has called when capitalism was at its most flowering, and they all believe that.

Something, I think, has changed; that’s the period where banking starts to really become the most powerful dominant force. That’s when FDR made this speech against monopoly. He’s talking about the banks. He’s explicitly saying it’s the banks that could do this. Now, we’re in a period where finance is so dominant and so parasitical and degenerate. We’re in a period of such concentration of ownership. I think that’s the underlying thing that’s going on here. It’s not just about Trump. We have to talk about why has this far-right, which has always been there, why are they now breaking through?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

Why are they allied with these people who essentially are working against their central interest? Because they don’t care about these people. They don’t give a damn about the so-called unwashed masses that voted for Trump, whomever they might be, whether they’re Republicans, independents, or whatever. They don’t care about these people. I take it back even further than that, not necessarily for Bannon, but I take it back to the run on the gold markets that Fisk and Gould tried in 1869, as I recall. The only thing that stopped them was Grant and his Treasury Secretary decided to blow them up. They blew them up by selling $4 million the U.S. had in gold and flooded the market with gold, and the gold price plunged dramatically and ruined all these billionaires or millionaires, as you said. Although Gould and Fisk probably did come close to being… they were multi, multimillionaires. Let’s put it that way.

Then you get what you said. You get that period all the way up to the Roaring Twenties and so forth. Then you get FDR, and then you get Lewis Powell, the justice who wrote the memo, the memo that essentially said what I was talking about before we went on camera, what Franklin was so fearful of and convinced Jefferson to be fearful of it at the time of the founding of the country, and that was corporations and corporate power. What they were looking at, of course, was the British East India Company, which had corrupted the entire monarchy in England for money. It was running India. It had its own army. It started wars. It caused governments to fall. It would then start another war. It was the imperial arm of empire, if you will. But none of the kings, it was founded in 1600, I think, with James, when James took over from Elizabeth. None of the kings, and certainly Victoria, who got the most from it out of India, where it was just, it was the government. It wasn’t Britain; it was the British East India Company. You didn’t mess with the British East India Company. You’d die if you did. And that scared the bejesus out of people like Franklin who knew this history and knew what corporate power could do to you, and especially when they’re looking at people like Hamilton who were talking about speculation being something that had to be tolerated because that’s the way you built up an economy, debt that had to be tolerated because that’s the way you built up a country. You got debt, massive debt, through speculation. That was the beginning of the corporate movement, I think, in America, which tried to surface again and again and again in various ways. I think that memo by Powell, which turned on people like Charles Koch, it even turned on David Koch, I’m told, it got them to thinking in 30-year, 40-year increments. The only way we can change this is to start at the very bottom, go to the states, to the councils, the towns, the cities, the towns, the states themselves, the legislature, and let’s persuade all these people to be on our side, which is the side of corporate America, the side of business is the way they put it. They captured them. They got the Republican Party to be their instrument for capturing them.

Many times, as Nancy MacLean, I think it is, in her book about the Kochs, many times the people, and this was an exquisite technique they used, the people that they were using to do their purposes didn’t know that they were being used. Those purposes were expressed in ways that were locally acceptable but built this mechanism that was eventually going to take the majority of the country in its grasp. The mechanism was exactly what you’re talking about. Investment banks, big banks, big money, corporate America, and that being the ultimate goal of the state, not equality, not justice, not good government, corporate control of the state. That’s what they were after, and that’s what they’re still after today. I think this is the latest manifestation of it. David’s dead, but Charles is still out there. I think Charles is a little bit worried about what he created. I really do. I don’t know the man at all, but I know some people who are around him, and I think he’s a bit worried about what he created because what he was thinking of was this perfect corporate state, which is what they always think of. It would be absolutely wonderful, beautiful. He would reap tons of money from it, and the country would be better off because a corporation looks after its people. Well, it isn’t happening that way. I can’t imagine that some of these people feel that if it is happening the way Ralph Nader and others, and apparently you, believe it’s happening. I can’t believe that some of these people are still going along with it. They got to know the danger.

Paul Jay

Yeah, there’s a strange unholy alliance, I called it in my piece. They’re also at war with each other. Steve Bannon is denouncing Musk now. Bannon is actually positioning himself very smartly, I think, for when people get disillusioned with Musk. He’ll be there as the anti-Musk, anti-corporate guy.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

He doesn’t have a wallet, a thick wallet in the back pocket.

Paul Jay

No, but he wants to control the base and the votes of the base, which is his card.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

He’s Trotsky. Lenin, Kerensky, whomever else you want to pick out of that melange of people at that time in 1917. He’s Trotsky. He doesn’t care about the–

Paul Jay

I think the underlying thing here is they know they’re facing some catastrophic crises. They know the climate is serious. It doesn’t matter what they say. They know what’s coming. They also know the global economy is so much smoke and mirrors right now. It wouldn’t take very much. There are a bunch of different trigger points that would cause an 07/08 type crisis, except far worse.

There was a study done about a year ago by the Bank for International Settlements that the amount of money that’s out there that’s not on any bank’s books because essentially they’re massive currency transfers, was it 90 trillion or some insane amount? More than the whole global economy is sitting out there going back and forth, not on any bank’s books because they’re just called transfers, except what happens when the date comes due for Bank A to pay off Bank B, and Bank A doesn’t have the money. Now Bank A goes down, Bank B goes down, and now it’s a domino that’s even worse than the 07/08 domino because, according to the Bank for International Settlements, the Fed doesn’t have enough money to plug that hole. They may have in 07/08, plug the hole, but there’s no such money. They couldn’t print enough money to deal with that.

They know the shit’s coming at the level of the global economy. They know there’s a climate crisis coming. They know they can’t give up on the Chinese market, and they can’t also compete and fight China. They don’t know what to do, so they’re going to try to do both.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

You’ve got another dimension to it that is frightening, truly frightening. That is, and Trump has just spoken on it, and I’m not sure exactly how to take his words, but he’s spoken on it in a way, if I got the words right, that makes some sense to me and my concern, but I don’t count that as firm for a minute. And that is the fact that we are right now working feverishly in both strategic planning and technology to achieve a first-strike capability that will be victorious with nuclear weapons.

Paul Jay

Yeah, and that’s the Iron Dome.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

That’s truly frightening.

Paul Jay

I think this is so important, and almost nobody’s talking about it. When Trump talks about the American-built Iron Dome, he’s not really saying what it really is. And what it really is, is the weaponization of space on steroids. It’s all about space-based weapons and they’re supposedly going to use lasers to shoot down incoming ICBMs and so on. My line about this has been, the only thing worse than the American Iron Dome being a boondoggle that doesn’t work is that it does work.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

I don’t know if you’ve seen– Dan Grazier sent me a copy of it. Dan is a super hit at Stimson now. He was at Pogo. He’s at Stimson now. Chris Preble and two other authors just put together a paper. I recommend it to you. It’s on this new strategy and this new thinking, and they’ve pinned it, at least the initial phase of it. They’ve pinned it.

Paul Jay

I’d love to see it. I don’t think it’s that the Trumpian forces want to launch a first strike. They want the blackmail power that comes with that. They want to be able to say to the world what they were able to say in 1946 and ’47, we are the only ones with the bomb, now bow down. So they want to have such power in space they can say that to China, to Russia, whoever they have to say it to. I don’t know if they really believe they can get there or if they’re just going to make ridiculous amounts of money along the way.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

Could be both. I’m told the strategy is Russia and China’s nuclear stockpile plus. So they want to be able to first strike both Russia and China; that’s the planning parameter anyway, and win. That’s it in the gist. They want to strike those two combined arsenal and win.

Paul Jay

They got to know there’s no real winning. The threat of winning is what you’re, I think, trying to achieve. They know what nuclear winter is. Even if they don’t completely believe it, it sure ain’t a zero risk, and there’s lots of evidence it’s for real. What are you winning?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

You have no idea how much literature there is out there now contending that all of that Cold War hocus-pocus, and that’s the word one of the papers uses, was false, designed to scare people, and designed to make people think that this is terrible.

Paul Jay

Now you’re saying what? That the effects of nuclear war have been exaggerated?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

Yes, exactly.

Paul Jay

Well, that’s like Herman Kahn’s stuff. 

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

Yeah, and what goes around comes around. You learn your lessons one decade or a generation, you lose them, and you have to learn them again. Only trouble with learning them about nuclear weapons is you might not be around to learn them.

Paul Jay

Yeah. No one’s going to be here to say, I told you so.

Now, before we get into some of the foreign policy stuff, how do you think we get through to people who have been persuaded by Trump, either because supposedly he’s going to lower prices? The problem is there’s a lot of kernels of truth in a lot of what Trump says. There’s a kernel of truth that the whole size of the federal government, it’s not just that it’s bloated, it’s that that whole social safety net welfare state type of thing really is there to perpetuate the problem so that it never gets so extreme that people will rebel. But in itself, it’s not any solution, and the inequality has gotten worse and worse.

There’s elements of truth to what Trump says about Zelenskyy and what he says about Ukraine. I say elements of truth. It’s not by any means close to the whole truth. Certainly, there’s truth that the Americans lied to Russia about the expansion of NATO and expanded it in ways that it’s understandable how it’s seen as threatening. We can argue or not argue, and maybe we’ll agree. I can understand why it became a red line for the Russians. I don’t think it in any way justified the invasion, but these are all part of the complexity of the thing. The bottom line is people, 75-77 million people had faith in this guy. And if you look at the polling, the people who voted for Trump mostly still do. He’s losing a bit amongst independents. His polling is down a little bit, but that relatively broad base is still there.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

His polling seems to be suffering a bit in areas that are up close and personal with some of the domestic things he’s doing. I looked at one of them yesterday, and it seemed to me like it was reflecting damage done to certain sectors by the way the Border Patrol is forcing itself onto immigrants and picking them up, shackling them, and sending them off. The way the Border Patrol is going into schools, elementary schools, middle schools, junior high, high schools, and pulling people out of their seat in the classroom because they’re not citizens. Other things like that that are happening domestically on a regional basis. And that’s where he’s suffering. Some people are looking at it and saying, “Wow, I voted for this?” That’s going to multiply, I think, as these domestic policies take more and more effect.

Paul Jay

I ask myself, why now? You had the rise of Mussolini maybe in the ’20s, so the conditions weren’t so different. Hitler rises in the midst of a deep, deep economic crisis, the global crash. Well, we’re not there. The truth is the American economy is doing relatively well compared to most of the capitalist economies, maybe better than all.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

Better than Europe.

Paul Jay

Yeah, which makes me think that the people that are backing Trump, and I don’t mean the zealots, I mean people like Jamie Dimon who’s saying, “Don’t worry so much.” People from Wall Street who are tamping down on being so concerned. And it makes me think maybe they know something, and maybe that something is that they know the shit is really coming on the financial side. They know the climate crisis is happening way faster, and they know that the whole architecture of global finance is like a house of cards. They want to get a fascistic Mussolini-style power nationally because they’re afraid of how people are going to respond when the economy really tanks.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

That might be a better hypothesis than even you think. I look at what it might take and what we’ve been working on, for example, in the Climate Security Working Group and other places, with DOD, principally, but also DHS, Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and others. The domestic situation is going to get very, very bad, and we’re not prepared for it at all. Military is probably the only element that is prepared. Right now, the military is shivering in its boots to a certain extent because there are people standing at the door, as it were, going to knock and say, “Anything in here on climate change?” They’re going through papers, strategies, and other documents changing words just so there’s nothing they can find on a computer or whatever. No algorithm can go in and hunt these things down. But they’re really worried because they know probably better than any element of the federal bureaucracy. They know what’s ahead for us domestically.

Los Angeles is just… the fires in California, they’re just a bellwether. That’s all they are. These hurricanes and so forth. The winds in this country, because of the heat gradient, the winds in this country are going to increase over the next generation by 10 to 15 knots on a daily basis. We’ve just had some of the worst winds in my area that we’ve had here in the 35 years I’ve lived here. People notice that. When trees start falling over, when lines come down, people notice it, and it’s going to get worse. It’s going to get a lot worse.

We need some core here in the country to begin to think about how we’re going to deal with this domestically because our military is not sufficient. It’s simply not sufficient. Whether you put that core-

Paul Jay

Now, you’re talking about dealing with the consequences of climate disasters.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

I am. It’s going to be also, I don’t care how many divisions you put on the Southern border. We’ve done this. We did this at the Center for Naval Analysis. We simulated these things. It’s going to be half a billion to three-quarters of a billion by 2050, which is just around the corner, refugees in the world. Half of them are going to be male, and half of that half are going to be under 30. A lot of that under 30 is going to have a Kalashnikov and at least 20 rounds of ammunition. You can buy a Kalashnikov now for cheaper, and you can get a weapon at Big Mac or whatever.

We put so many weapons into the world, Paul, when we left that cache in Libya and didn’t do anything about it, and we left that cache in Iraq. Probably the two largest arms caches in the world outside of our arms manufacturers in this country, and it’s all over the world now. People ask me, “Where’s Hamas getting its weapons?” I’d say, “Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? You can pick a weapon anywhere.”

Paul Jay

Well, I love that Mexico said, fine, we’ll stop immigration and fentanyl if you’ll stop the guns coming into Mexico because it’s all coming from American arms manufacturers.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson

We’re sending drones down there to find fentanyl labs, and then special operating teams are going to go in there to get the labs and disappear. They’re not coming back.

Paul Jay

American banks are helping launder the money, too. Canadian banks, too, for that matter.